his thighs and calves and ankles were hot and trembly. Ahead
he could see the Overlook, mockingly distant, seeming to stare
at him with its many windows, as if this were some sort of
contest in which it was mildly interested.
Danny looked back over his shoulder and his hurried breathing
caught for a moment and then hurried on even faster. The
nearest lion was now only twenty feet behind, breasting
through the snow like a dog paddling in a pond. The two others
were to its right and left, pacing it. They were like an army
platoon on patrol, the dog, still off to their left, the
scout. The closest lion had its head down. The shoulders
bunched powerfully above its neck. The tail was up, as if in
the instant before he had turned to look it had been swishing
back and forth, back and forth. He thought it looked like a
great big housecat that was having a good time playing with a
mouse before killing it.
(-falling-)
No, if he fell he was dead. They would never let him get up.
They would pounce. He pinwheeled his arms madly and lunged
ahead, his center of gravity dancing just beyond his nose. He
caught it and hurried on, snapping glances back over his
shoulder. The air whistled in and out of his dry throat like
hot glass.
The world closed down to the dazzling snow, the green hedges,
and the whispery sound of his snowshoes. And something else. A
soft, muffled padding sound. He tried to hurry faster and
couldn't. He was walking over the buried driveway now, a small
boy with his face almost buried in the shadow of his parka
hood. The afternoon was still and bright.
When he looked back again, the point lion was only five feet
behind. It was grinning. Its mouth was open, its haunches
tensed down like a clockspring. Behind it and the others he
could see the rabbit, its head now sticking out of the snow,
bright green, as if it had turned its horrid blank face to
watch the end of the stalk.
Now, on the Overlook's front lawn between the circular drive
and the porch, he let the panic loose and began to run
clumsily in the snowshoes, not daring to look back now,
tilting further and further forward, his arms out ahead of him
like a blind man feeling for obstacles. His hood fell back,
revealing his complexion, paste white giving way to hectic red
blotches on his cheeks, his eyes bulging with terror. The
porch was very close now.
Behind him he heard the sudden hard crunch of snow as
something leaped.
He fell on the porch steps, screaming without sound, and
scrambled up them on his hands and knees, snowshoes clattering
and askew behind him.
There was a slashing sound in the air and sudden pain in his
leg. The ripping sound of cloth. Something else that might
have-must have-been in his mind.
Bellowing, angry roar.
Smell of blood and evergreen.
He fell full-length on the porch, sobbing hoarsely, the rich,
metallic taste of copper in his mouth. His heart was
thundering in his chest. There was a small trickle of blood
coming from his nose.
He had no idea how long he lay there before the lobby doors
flew open and Jack ran out, wearing just his jeans and a pair
of slippers. Wendy was behind him.
"Danny!" she screamed.
"Doc! Danny, for Christ's sake! What's wrong? What happened?"
Daddy was helping him up. Below the knee his snowpants were
ripped open. Inside, his woollen ski sock had been ripped open
and his calf had been shallowly scratched... as if he had
tried to push his way through a closely grown evergreen hedge
and the branches had clawed him.
He looked over his shoulder. Far down the lawn, past the
putting green, were a number of vague, snow-cowled humps. The
hedge animals. Between them and the playground. Between them
and the road.
His legs gave way. Jack caught him. He began to cry.
THE LOBBY
He had told them everything except what had happened to him
when the snow had blocked the end of the concrete ring. He
couldn't bring himself to repeat that. And be didn't know the
right words to express the creeping, lassitudinous sense of
terror he had felt when he heard the dead aspen leaves begin
to crackle furtively down there in the cold darkness. But he
told them about the soft sound of snow falling in clumps.
About the lion with its head and its bunched shoulders working
its way up and out of the snow to chase him. He even told them
about how the rabbit had turned its head to watch near the
end.
The three of them were in the lobby. Jack had built a roaring
blaze in the fireplace. Danny was bundled up in a blanket on
the small sofa where once, a million years ago, three nuns had
sat laughing like girls while they waited for the line at the
desk to thin out. He was sipping hot noodle soup from a mug.
Wendy sat beside him, stroking his hair. Jack had sat on the
floor, his face seeming to grow more and more still, more and
more set as Danny told his story. Twice he pulled his
handkerchief out of his back pocket and rubbed his sorelooking
lips with it.
"Then they chased me," he finished. Jack got up and went over
to the window, his back to them. He looked at his mommy. "They
chased me all the way up to the porch." He was struggling to
keep his voice calm, because if he stayed calm maybe they
would believe him. Mr. Stenger hadn't stayed calm. He had
started to cry and hadn't been able to stop SO THE MEN IN THE
WHITE COATS had come to take him away because if you couldn't
stop crying it meant you had LOST YOUR MARBLES and when would
you be back? NO ONE KNOWS. His parka and snowpants and the
clotted snowshoes lay on the rug just inside the big double
doors.
(I won't cry I won't let myself cry)
And he thought he could do that, but he couldn't stop
shaking. He looked into the fire and waited for Daddy to say
something. High yellow flames danced on the dark stone hearth.
A pine-knot exploded with a bang and sparks rushed up the
flue.
"Danny, come over here." Jack turned around. His face still
had that pinched, deathly look. Danny didn't like to look at
it.
"Jack-"
"I just want the boy over here for a minute."
Danny slipped off the sofa and came over beside his daddy.
"Good boy. Now what do you see?"
Danny bad known what he would see even before he got to the
window. Below the clutter of boot tracks, sled tracks, and
snowshoe tracks that marked their usual exercise area, the
snowfield that covered the Overlook's lawns sloped down to the
topiary and the playground beyond. It was marred by two sets
of tracks, one of them in a straight line from the porch to
the playground, the other a long, looping line coming back up.
"Only my tracks, Daddy. But-"
"What about the hedges, Danny?"
Danny's lips began to tremble. He was going to cry. What if
he couldn't stop?
(i won't cry I Won't Cry Won't Won't WON'T)
"All covered with snow," he whispered. "But, Daddy-"
"What? I couldn't hear you!"
"Jack, you're cross-examining him! Can't you see he's upset,
he's-"
"Shut up! Well, Danny?"
"They scratched me, Daddy. My leg-"
"You must have cut your leg on the crust of the snow."
Then Wendy was between them, her face pale and angry. "What
are you trying to make him do?" she asked him. "Confess to
murder? What's wrong with you?"
The strangeness in his eyes seemed to break then. "I'm trying
to help him find the difference between something real and
something that was only an hallucination, that's all." He
squatted by Danny so they were on an eye-to-eye level, and
then hugged him tight. "Danny, it didn't really happen. Okay?
It was like one of those trances you have sometimes. That's
all."
"Daddy?"
"What, Dan?"
"I didn't cut my leg on the crust. There isn't any crust.
It's all powdery snow. It won't even stick together to make
snowballs. Remember we tried to have a snowball fight and
couldn't?"
He felt his father stiffen against him. "The porch step,
then."
Danny pulled away. Suddenly he had it. It had flashed into
his mind all at once, the way things sometimes did, the way it
had about the woman wanting to be in that gray man's pants. He
stared at his father with widening eyes.
"You know I'm telling the truth," he whispered, shocked.
"Danny-"Jack's face, tightening.
"You know because you saw-"
The sound of Jack's open palm striking Danny's face was flat,
not dramatic at all. The boy's head rocked back, the palmprint
reddening on his cheek like a brand.
Wendy made a moaning noise.
For a moment they were still, the three of them, and then
Jack grabbed for his son and said, "Danny, I'm sorry, you
okay, doc?"
"You hit him, you bastardl" Wendy cried. "You dirty bastard!"
She grabbed his other arm and for a moment Danny was pulled
between them.
"Oh please stop pulling me!" he screamed at them, and there
was such agony in his voice that they both let go of him, and
then the tears had to come and he collapsed, weeping, between
the sofa and the window, his parents staring at him
helplessly, the way children might stare at a toy broken in a
furious tussle over to whom it belonged. In the fireplace
another pine-knot exploded like a hand grenade, making them
all jump.
* * *
Wendy gave him baby aspirin and Jack slipped him,
unprotesting, between the sheets of his cot. He was asleep in
no time with his thumb in his mouth.
"I don't like that," she said. "It's a regression."
Jack didn't reply.
She looked at him softly, without anger, without a smile,
either. "You want me to apologize for calling you a bastard?
All right, I apologize. I'm sorry. You still shouldn't have
hit him.
"I know," he muttered. "I know that. I don't know what the
hell came over me."
"You promised you'd never hit him again."
He looked at her furiously, and then the fury collapsed.
Suddenly, with pity and horror, she saw what Jack would look
like as an old man. She had never seen him look that way
before.
(?what way?)
Defeated, she answered herself. He looks beaten.
He said: "I always thought I could keep my promises."
She went to him and put her hands on his arm. "All right,
it's over. And when the ranger comes to check us, we'll tell
him we all want to go down. All right?"
"All right," Jack said, and at that moment, at least, he
meant it. The same way he had always meant it on those
mornings after, looking at his pale and haggard face in the
bathroom mirror. I'm going to stop, going to cut it off flat.
But morning gave way to afternoon, and in the afternoons he
felt a little better. And afternoon gave way to night. As some
great twentieth-century thinker had said, night must fall.
He found himself wishing that Wendy would ask him about the
hedges, would ask him what Danny meant, when he said You know
because you saw- If she did, he would tell her everything.
Everything. The hedges, the woman in the room, even about the
fire hose that seemed to have switched positions. But where
did confession stop? Could he tell her he'd thrown the magneto
away, that they could all be down in Sidewinder right now if
he hadn't done that?
What she said was, "Do you want tea?"
"Yes. A cup of tea would be good."
She went to the door and paused there, rubbing her forearms
through her sweater. "It's my fault as much as yours," she
said. "What were we doing while he was going through that...
dream, or whatever it was?"
"Wendy-"
"We were sleeping," she said. "Sleeping like a couple of
teenage kids with their itch nicely scratched."
"Stop it," he said. "It's over."
"No," Wendy answered, and gave him a strange, restless smile.
"It's not over."
She went out to make tea, leaving him to keep watch over
their son.
THE ELEVATOR
Jack awoke from a thin and uneasy sleep where huge and ill-
defined shapes chased him through endless snowfields to what
he first thought was another dream: darkness, and in it, a
sudden mechanical jumble of noises-clicks and clanks,
hummings, rattlings, snaps and whooshes.
Then Wendy sat up beside him and he knew it was no dream.
"What's that?" Her hand, cold marble, gripped his wrist. He
restrained an urge to shake it off-how in the hell was he
supposed to know what it was? The illuminated clock on his
nightstand said it was five minutes to twelve.
The humming sound again. Loud and steady, varying the
slightest bit. Followed by a clank as the humming ceased. A
rattling bang. A thump. Then the humming resumed.
It was the elevator.
Danny was sitting up. "Daddy? Daddy?" His voice was sleepy
and scared.
"Right here, doc," Jack said. "Come on over and jump in. Your
mom's awake, too."
The bedclothes rustled as Danny got on the bed between them.
"It's the elevator," he whispered.
"That's right," Jack said. "Just the elevator."
"What do you mean, just?" Wendy demanded. There was an ice-
skim of hysteria on her voice. "It's the middle of the night.
Who's running it?"
Hummmmmmm. Click/clank. Above them now. The rattle of the
gate accordioning back, the bump of the doors opening and
closing. Then the hum of the motor and the cables again.
Danny began to whimper.
Jack swung his feet out of bed and onto the floor. "It's
probably a short. I'll check."
"Don't you dare go out of this room!"
"Don't be stupid," he said, pulling on his robe. "It's my
job."
She was out of bed herself a moment later, pulling Danny with
her.
"We'll go, too."
"Wendy-"
"What's wrong?" Danny asked somberly. "What's wrong, Daddy?"
Instead of answering he turned away, his face angry and set.
He belted his robe around him at the door, opened it, and
stepped out into the dark hall.
Wendy hesitated for a moment, and it was actually Danny who
began to move first. She caught up quickly, and they went out
together.
Jack hadn't bothered with the lights. She fumbled for the
switch that lit the four spaced overheads in the hallway that
led to the main corridor. Up ahead, Jack was already turning
the corner. This time Danny found the switchplate and flicked
all three switches up. The hallway leading down to the stairs
and the elevator shaft came alight.
Jack was standing at the elevator station, which was flanked
by benches and cigarette urns. He was standing motionless in
front of the closed elevator door. In his faded tartan
bathrobe and brown leather slippers with the rundown heels,
his hair all in sleep corkscrews and Alfalfa cowlicks, he
looked to her like an absurd twentieth-century Hamlet, an
indecisive figure so mesmerized by onrushing tragedy that he
was helpless to divert its course or alter it in any way.
(jesus stop thinking so crazy-)
Danny's hand bad tightened painfully on her own. He was
looking up at her intently, his face strained and anxious. He
had been catching the drift of her thoughts, she realized.
Just bow much or how little of them he was getting was
impossible to say, but she flushed, feeling much the same as
if he had caught her in a masturbatory act.
"Come on," she said, and they went down the hall to Jack.
The hummings and clankings and thumpings were louder here,
terrifying in a disconnected, benumbed way. Jack was staring
at the closed door with feverish intensity. Through the
diamond-shaped window in the center of the elevator door she
thought she could make out the cables, thrumming slightly. The
elevator clanked to a stop below them, at lobby level. They
beard the doors thump open. And...
(party)
Why had she thought party? The word had simply jumped into
her head for no reason at all. The silence in the Overlook was
complete and intense except for the weird noises coming up the
elevator shaft.
(must have been quite a party)
(???WHAT PARTY???)
For just a moment her mind had filled with an image so real
that it seemed to be a memory... not just any memory but one
of those you treasure, one of those you keep for very special
occasions and rarely mention aloud. Lights... hundreds, maybe
thousands of them. Lights and colors, the pop of champagne
corks, a forty-piece orchestra playing Glenn Miller's "In the
Mood." But Glenn Miller had gone down in his bomber before she
was born, how could she have a memory of Glenn Miller?
She looked down at Danny and saw his head had cocked to one
side, as if he was hearing something she couldn't hear. His
face was very pale.
Thump.
The door had slid shut down there. A humming whine as the
elevator began to rise. She saw the engine housing on top of
the car first through the diamondshaped window, then the
interior of the car, seen through the further diamond shapes
made by the brass gate. Warm yellow light from the car's
overhead. It was empty. The car was empty. It was empty but
(on the night of the party they must have crowded in by the
dozens, crowded the car way beyond its safety limit but of
course it had been new then and all of them wearing masks)
(????WHAT MASKS????)
The car stopped above them, on the third floor. She looked at
Danny. His face was all eyes. His mouth was pressed into a
frightened, bloodless slit. Above them, the brass gate rattled
back. The elevator door thumped open, it thumped open because
it was time, the time had come, it was time to say
(Goodnight... goodnight... yes, it was lovely... no, i really
can't stay for the unmasking... early to bed, early to rise...
oh, was that Sheila?... the monk?... isn't that witty, Sheila
coming as a monk?... yes, goodnight...good)
Thump.
Gears clashed. The motor engaged. The car began to whine back
down.
"Jack," she whispered. "What is it? What's wrong with it?"
"A short circuit," he said. His face was like wood. "I told
you, it was a short circuit."
"I keep hearing voices in my head!" she cried. "What is it?
What's wrong? I feel like I'm going crazy!"
"What voices?" He looked at her with deadly blandness.
She turned to Danny. "Did you-?"
Danny nodded slowly. "Yes. And music. Like from a long time
ago. In my head."
The elevator car stopped again. The hotel was silent,
creaking, deserted. Outside, the wind whined around the eaves
in the darkness.
"Maybe you are both crazy," Jack said conversationally. "I
don't hear a goddamned thing except that elevator having a
case of the electrical hiccups. If you two want to have duet
hysterics, fine. But count me out."
The elevator was coming down again.
Jack stepped to the right, where a glass-fronted box was
mounted on the wall at chest height. He smashed his bare fist
against it. Glass tinkled inward. Blood dripped from two of
his knuckles. He reached in and took out a key with a long,
smooth barrel.
"Jack, no. Don't."
"I am going to do my job. Now leave me alone, Wendy!"
She tried to grab his arm. He pushed her backward. Her feet
tangled in the hem of her robe and she fell to the carpet with
an ungainly thump. Danny cried out shrilly and fell on his
knees beside her. Jack turned back to the elevator and thrust
the key into the socket.
The elevator cables disappeared and the bottom of the car
came into view in the small window. A second later Jack turned
the key hard. There was a grating, screeching sound as the
elevator car came to an instant standstill. For a moment the
declutched motor in the basement whined even louder, and then
its circuit breaker cut in and the Overlook went unearthly
still. The night wind outside seemed very loud by comparison.
Jack looked stupidly at the gray metal elevator door. There
were three splotches of blood below the keyhole from his
lacerated knuckles.
He turned back to Wendy and Danny for a moment. She was
sitting up, and Danny had his arm around her. They were both
staring at him carefully, as if he was a stranger they had
never seen before, possibly a dangerous one. He opened his
mouth, not sure what was going to come out.
"It... Wendy, it's my job."
She said clearly: "Fuck your job"
He turned back to the elevator, worked his fingers into the
crack that ran down the right side of the door, and got it to
open a little way. Then he was able to get his whole weight on
it and threw the door open.
The car had stopped halfway, its floor at Jack's chest level.
Warm light still spilled out of it, contrasting with the oily
darkness of the shaft below.
He looked in for what seemed a long time.
"It's empty," he said then. "A short circuit, like I said."
He hooked his fingers into the slot behind the door and began
to pull it closed... then her hand was on his shoulder,
surprisingly strong, yanking him away.
"Wendy!" he shouted. But she had already caught the car's
bottom edge and pulled herself up enough so she could look in.
Then, with a convulsive heave of her shoulder and belly
muscles, she tried to boost herself all the way up. For a
moment the issue was in doubt. Her feet tottered over the
blackness of the shaft and one pink slipper fell from her foot
and slipped out of sight.
"Mommy!" Danny screamed.
Then she was up, her cheeks flushed, her forehead as pale and
shining as a spirit lamp. "What about this, Jack? Is this a
short circuit?" She threw something and suddenly the hall was
full of drifting confetti, red and white and blue and yellow.
"Is this?" A green party streamer, faded to a pale pastel
color with age.
"And this?"
She tossed it out and it came to rest on the blue-black
jungle carpet, a black silk cat's-eye mask, dusted with
sequins at the temples.
"Does that look like a short circuit to you, Jack?" she
screamed at him.
Jack stepped slowly away from it, shaking his head
mechanically back and forth. The cat's-eye mask stared up
blankly at the ceiling from the confettistrewn hallway carpet.
THE BALLROOM
It was the first of December.
Danny was in the east-wing ballroom, standing on an over-
stuffed, high-backed wing chair, looking at the clock under
glass. It stood in the center of the ballroom's high,
ornamental mantelpiece, flanked by two large ivory elephants.
He almost expected the elephants would begin to move and try
to gore him with their tusks as he stood there, but they were
moveless. They were "safe." Since the night of the elevator he
bad come to divide all things at the Overlook into two
categories. The elevator, the basement, the playground, Room
217, and the Presidential Suite (it was Suite, not Sweet; he
had seen the correct spelling in an account book Daddy had
been reading at supper last night and had memorized it
carefully)-those places were "unsafe." Their quarters, the
lobby, and the porch were "safe." Apparently the ballroom was,
too.
(The elephants are, anyway.)
He was not sure about other places and so avoided them on
general principle.
He looked at the clock inside the glass dome. It was under
glass because all its wheels and cogs and springs were
showing. A chrome or steel track ran around the outside of
these works, and directly below the clockface there was a
small axis bar with a pair of meshing cogs at either end. The
hands of the clock stood at quarter past XI, and although he
didn't know Roman numerals he could guess by the configuration
of the hands at what time the clock had stopped. The clock
stood on a velvet base. In front of it, slightly distorted by
the curve of the dome, was a carefully carved silver key.
He supposed that the clock was one of the things he wasn't
supposed to touch, like the decorative fire-tools in their
brass-bound cabinet by the lobby fireplace or the tall china
highboy at the back of the dining room.
A sense of injustice and a feeling of angry rebellion
suddenly rose in him and
(never mind what t' m not supposed to touch, just never mind.
touched me, hasn't it? played with me, hasn't it?)
It had. And it hadn't been particularly careful not to break
him, either.
Danny put his hands out, grasped the glass dome, and lifted
it aside. He let one finger play over the works for a moment,
the pad of his index finger denting against the cogs, running
smoothly over the wheels. He picked up the silver key. For an
adult it would have been uncomfortably small, but it fitted
his own fingers perfectly. He placed it in the keyhole at the
center of the clockface. It went firmly home with a tiny
click, more felt than heard. It wound to the right, of course;
clockwise.
Danny turned the key until it would turn no more and then
removed it. The clock began to tick. Cogs turned. A large
balance wheel rocked back and forth in semicircles. The hands
were moving. If you kept your head perfectly motionless and
your eyes wide open, you could see the minute hand inching
along toward its meeting some forty-five minutes from now with
the hour hand. At XII.
(And the Red Death held sway over all.)
He frowned, and then shook the thought away. It was a thought
with no meaning or reference for him.
He reached his index finger out again and pushed the minute
band up to the hour, curious about what might happen. It
obviously wasn't a cuckoo clock, but that steel rail bad to
have some purpose.
There was a small, ratcheting series of clicks, and then the
clock began to tinkle Strauss's "Blue Danube Waltz." A punched
roll of cloth no more than two inches in width began to
unwind. A small series of brass strikers rose and fell. From
behind the clockface two figures glided into view along the
steel track, ballet dancers, on the left a girl in a fluffy
skirt and white stockings, on the right a boy in a black
leotard and ballet slippers. Their hands were held in arches
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